Today’s blog post celebrates the one year anniversary of the successful migration of the .au domain registry to Afilias Australia. It has been an enormous year, and today we reflect on this achievement and the standards that have been implemented by Afilias to ensure a reliable and secure presence for the entire Australian internet community.

A world record achievement

On 1 July 2018 Afilias AU performed the largest migration of an internet top level domain in a single transition. The Afilias team were pleased to have the transition of 3,153,979 .au domain names acknowledged by a Guinness World Record achievement in September 2018. 

As the world’s second largest domain name registry provider with over 22 million domain names under management, including .org (more than 10 million domains) and .info (more than 6 million domains), Afilias has now completed 25 successful domain registry transitions.

Maintaining high standards of security and availability

Afilias AU, as the current registry provider has taken significant steps to support the delivery of stable, secure and reliable operations for .au.

In February 2019 Afilias AU acquired two ISO Certifications as the result of a third party audit, including:

ISO Certification 22301 for Business Continuity Management; and 
ISO Certification 27001 for Information Security Management. 

These certifications indicate that Afilias AU meets internationally recognised standards and ensure that the .au registry is operating at global best practice. 

Prior to transition, Afilias made a major investment in DNS infrastructure (local servers) to support the delivery of a reliable system in Australia. In addition to the global network of high performance servers, Afilias installed 8 DNS nodes, throughout Australia to strengthen the .au infrastructure and provide a state of the art system for .au. 

The future of .au

We are proud of the work behind the recent announcement that direct, second level registration will become available to the general Australian public in Q4 2019. This change will mean that shorter domain names can be registered, there will be greater choice in .au domain names for the general Australian public and bring Australia in line with international standards.

Afilias AU would like to thank the entire team at auDA, our .au registrar and reseller partners and the Afilias global team for their hard work and dedication in our first year as the registry provider for .au. It has been a collaborative effort and we look forward to maintaining a progressive culture throughout the year ahead.

If you have a question or would like to provide some feedback, remember you can reach us at blog@afilias.com.au